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Vitruvius story of the origins of dwelling in the Primitive hut, and its links to the theory of rhetoric, can still shed light on the signicance of architecture as an art of persuasion.

A Primitive exchange: on rhetoric and architectural symbol

Stephen Frith
In relating stories about origins that recall an idealized Primitive condition, Vitruvius seeks legitimacy for judgement about architecture. At issue is the problem of authority, and Vitruvius is anxious about authority, and about order. Vitruvius audience for his story of the Primitive dwelling, as for the rest of his treatise, the Ten Books on Architecture, is the emperor Octavian, introduced in the dedicatory preface as imperator Caesar. His book to Caesar asserts a commonplace among rhetoricians, that authority is sought in a distant past, and in exemplars, useful precedents that promise a perfect work. Dcor, writes Vitruvius, demands the faultless ensemble of a work composed, in accordance with precedent, of approved details. It obeys convention, which in Greek is called thematismos, or custom or nature (trans Granger, 1983, i.2.5). The task of the orator was to demonstrate (demonstratio) that authority, and so for architecture, in his mythmaking and concern to demonstrate the truth of his opinions, Vitruvius establishes that the task of architecture is the representation of order. (trans Rowland, 1999, ii.1.2). The creation of shelter came through a process of imitation of nature, and the imitation of each other, because people are by nature imitative (ii.1.3). In response to natural conditions of sun, rain and tempest, buildings and their distinctive details emerged. From rough buildings came arts and crafts that are characteristic of civilized peoples: Then, training their own spirits and reviewing the most important ideas conceived among the various arts and crafts, they began to complete, not houses any longer, but real residences, with foundations, built up with brick walls or stone, roofed with timbers and tiles. Furthermore, on the basis of observations made in their studies, they progressed from haphazard and uncertain opinions into the stable principles of symmetry (ii.1.7). By symmetry Vitruvius intends an order beyond the limits provided by bilateral arrangements, an order appropriately and decorously represented, whose main characteristic is harmony. In Book 1 Chapter 2, Vitruvius writes that architecture consists of ordering and design, as well as symmetry and correctness and allocation. He goes on to elaborate these terms, and then argues that these main species of architecture are produced by analysis and invention, which he defines as the unravelling of obscure problems, arriving, through energetic flexibility, at a new set of principles (trans Rowland 1999). In this regard, he is in line with Ciceros and Quintilians advice to students of rhetoric, that invention works from existing principles towards new arrangements, rather than being bound rigidly by rules. Primary causes and savage character The notion of the Primitive in Vitruvius Ten Books on Architecture reveals two strong themes that are intertwined in his description of the origins of building. The first is that most concerned with primary causes, those elements of architecture that are most essential, origins in the past that authenticate the architecture of the present, and also enable a reflection on the telos or right end of architecture. The second notion of the Primitive to which Vitruvius alludes is that of its savage character.
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Vitruvius story of the origins of dwelling has given an enduring starting point for the re-creation of the Primitive hut at any time in history
Vitruvius story of the origins of dwelling has given an enduring starting point for the re-creation of the Primitive hut at any time in history. It became the primary vehicle for a meditation on architectural origins or architectural veracity in any writings thereafter. With the story of origins of the Primitive hut is also woven the history of human speech and community arising from the gathering around the hearth. Through this narrative, architecture becomes embedded with the memory of primary human symbols, especially of fire and of the hearth, and of shelter: The beginning of association among human beings, their meeting and living together, thus came into being because of the discovery of fire

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The Primitive and agonistic nature of the world underlies all things human and material. In this primordial state of chaos, human beings are wild beasts threatened by violence and natural disaster. Through the agency of building, mediated in a community by human grunts and speech, the agonistic nature of the world is brought into order around a fire. In this way Vitruvius aligns the origins of building with the origins of human society and of concord. Through the reconciliation of the Primitive dwelling with human speech, order is possible in society. His speculation on the origins of human discourse centred on the need to communicate about human shelter places the practice of architecture at the centre of human affairs (ii.1). The motivation for this gathering of savage minds together is to share the benefits of fire, once human fear of fire had been overcome: 1. The men of old were born like the wild beasts, in woods, caves, and groves, and lived on savage fare. As time went on, the thickly crowded trees in a certain place, tossed by storms and winds, and rubbing their branches against one another, caught fire, and so the inhabitants were put to flight, being terrified of the furious flame. After it subsided they drew near, and observing that they were very comfortable standing before the warm fire, they put on logs and, while thus keeping it alive, brought other people to it, showing them by signs how much comfort they got from it. With this gathering human beings developed speech and formed social arrangements, and began in that first assembly to construct shelters (ii.1.2): In that gathering of men, at a time when the utterance of sound was purely individual, from daily habits they fixed upon articulate words just as these had happened to come; then, by indicating by name things in common use, the result was that by this chance they began to talk, and this originated conversation with one another. 2. Therefore it was the discovery of fire that originally gave rise to the coming together of men, to the deliberative assembly, and to social intercourse. (Vitruvius, trans Morgan, 1960, ii.1.12) Society can only have developed once the origins of building had been established, permitting human beings to develop the other arts and sciences, and so human beings passed from a rude and barbarous mode of life to civilization and refinement (ii.1.6). The theme of the Primitive and its association with fire is further associated with the notion of origins of materials in Book 2 Chapter 2. The origins of architectural science are aligned with the history of thinking about primordial substances, about fire and water. Vitruvius observes that, the school of the Pythagoreans added air and the earthy to the list of those things considered the indivisibles, or the atoms of Democritus and Epicurus (trans Morgan, 1960, ii.2.1). The Primitive origins of both architecture and the materials used in its construction are couched in terms of primary causes, so that the nature of things can be

interpreted as a truthful exploration in accordance with the doctrines of the physicists (ii.1.9). His writing thus seeks legitimation in the authority of primary causes, in the works of famous philosophers, and is arranged, as in forensic rhetoric, as a matter of accurate demonstration (ii.1.9). In his demonstration of principles and rules of architecture, Vitruvius argues from origins as causes, seeking limits. A limit in architecture can be seen as an originating cause expressed as an eternal principle. When we read in the Ten Books on Architecture a story that gives authority to origins, it is as if a myth about the origins of the house satisfies the demand for a first principle. This way of conceiving the enterprise of architecture shares Aristotles emphasis in Metaphysics, ii.1.56, where he writes that we cannot know a truth without first seeking a cause. He says in the Posterior Analytics, we only have knowledge of a thing when we know its cause (trans Tredennick, 1960, 71b.30). Aristotle describes several kinds of causes, such as first and formal causes as well as a final cause, or telos: Further, the Final cause of a thing is an end (telos) and is such that it does not happen for the sake of something else, but all other things happen for its sake. The Final cause is a limit, because the end is a limit (trans Tredennick, 1933, ii.2.10). Aristotle also recognizes that the Good, ie, the end, is one of the causes (i.2.8). In the Nichomachean Ethics he acknowledges in the opening sentence that the Good is that at which all things aim, but he later argues against Platonic universalizing of the Good: Nor yet will the Ideal Good be any more good because it is eternal, seeing that a white thing that lasts a long time is no whiter than one that lasts only a day (trans Rackham, 1926, i.6.6). In architectural parlance, the good of a work becomes conflated with its telos as its right and good end. By defining limits order is established. No limits lead to moralizing: Solon, for example, writing about the evils of compound interest, says that riches have no limit, and money becomes a universal, as well as a divisive and subversive force (cited by Thomson, 1955, sol i.71). The absence of limits upsets minds like those of Aristotle and Vitruvius, because of the absence of a telos as a cause for order. We now no longer fear, like Pascal in his Meditations, the openness of an infinite series of numbers, and they are no longer a threat to our perception of order or representative of disorder. In Vitruvius Ten Books, the stories of the Primitive, of origins as ends, provide a limit from which the authority of his principles and rules can be constructed. The framework for this construction he borrows from rhetoric.

If the task of architecture is to represent order, its means are enabled by eloquence
Rhetorical framework Vitruvius reliance on rhetoric is extensive, not just in the form of his treatise, but in the aesthetic

Stephen Frith

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prejudice he brings to the judgement of architecture. If the task of architecture is to represent order, its means are enabled by eloquence. Vitruvius finds in the rhetorical manuals a structure that makes sense to his Roman audience, educated in the schools of rhetoric. The master of rhetoric in the first century was Cicero, and the story of the origins of human society is borrowed by Vitruvius from De Oratore.1 The story is presented in the form of a dialogue in the Tusculan villa of Ciceros friend Antonius, in September, 91bce. Cicero, in De Oratore, i.8.3233, writes: For the one point in which we have our very greatest advantage over the brute creation is that we hold converse with one another, and can reproduce our thought in word. Not only knowledge is required in the craft of oratory, as it is for architecture in Vitruvius Ten Books, but also the demand for style, for the ability to speak with fullness and variety (trans Granger, 1983, i.13.59),2 and for a style that is dignified and graceful and in conformity with the general modes of thought and judgement. The latter is said to be the essential concern of the orator (i.12.54),3 and in Vitruvius writings emerges as essential to the activity of the architect (i.1.14). Ciceros treatment of eloquence in De Oratore is first about how the attainment of eloquence is to be achieved, and second what truly constitutes an eloquent speech. Vitruvius borrows both the themes and arguments from the discourse to develop a theory (ratiocinatio) about architecture. He is indebted to Cicero for his demand for a knowledge of practice and not only of theory in regards to architecture, as well as the educational background appropriate to an architect. The orator, like the architect, requires knowledge both theoretical and practical,4 as well as natural talent, an inborn capacity for the task.5 The education of the orator should be based in the natural and social sciences,6 befitting a free-born man of liberal education (Cicero, i.31.137).7 Cicero writes that: no one should be numbered with the orators who is not accomplished in all those arts that befit the wellbred (i.16.72).8 Vitruvius is positioning the architect socially in the same milieu of the well-bred, and the task of architecture also becomes one of eloquence, such that a work of architecture could be seen to speak forth. The use of rhetorical categories is reinterpreted by Vitruvius to suit his text and situation. Just as Cicero describes the five parts of rhetoric dependent on embracing virtues such as appropriate to judgement, order and decorum, so Vitruvius describes principles with the triad firmitas, utilitas and venustas, or soundness, utility and attractiveness, as overriding virtues (trans Rowland, 1999, i.3.2). This is also similar in structure to the way Quintilian offers the triad of excellence (virtutes), those of correctness, lucidity and elegance, ruling over the different parts of style (trans Butler, 1921, i.5.1). As for oratory, so for architecture: without eloquence there is no order in human affairs. The significance of the reliance by Vitruvius on rhetoric cannot be overstated. Architecture takes on the character of oratory in Western traditions,

The signicance of the reliance by Vitruvius on rhetoric cannot be understated. Architecture takes on the character of oratory in Western traditions, such that buildings are expected to say something
such that buildings are expected to say something. In the Ten Books, the way we are encouraged to judge architecture is the same mode of reasoning that oratory was to be judged by. Some of the key words in the lexicon of architecture find their way there from the teachers of rhetoric. Etymologically, the word for plan or plot is shared with that of the plot or narrative thread of a speech. The word elevation to describe the public face of a building is borrowed from rhetorics demand for an elevated mode of speaking. The way Vitruvius teaches us to design a work of architecture is similar to that for putting a speech together, through invention, arrangement, memory, delivery and style. These are the five parts of rhetoric, and for an educated Roman, the same practices are put into action for the making of architecture. Important to both oratory and architecture is the character of the work, the decorum underlying the arrangements and ornaments, and the appropriateness of the work in the public domain. This stands for that Aristotle, in On the Parts of the Animals 639b15, uses the expression for the sake of which that takes on a specific importance as the purpose of a thing. Aristotle assumes this to be equivalent to the logos (): and the logos is always the beginning point (arche) for things arising from nature, as well as those which spring from techne. The logos of a thing, now aligned with its originating principle, its arche, is the inherent design that it carries within itself. Things carry within themselves a narrative of their purpose, for logos at this time meant something like a reasoned tale (Mortley, 1986), whether they arise from nature, or whether, as for a work of architecture, they arise from culture. Many of the writings of Aristotle were about biology, reflections on the causes of things, how things grow and fade and renew themselves, and so progress. E. H. Gombrich observes that if Aristotle had not conceived of nature as a progress in his writings, then the notion of the Primitive would never have taken root (Gombrich, 2002). Aristotles use of the concept of entelechy, that inner potentiality of an organism whereby seeds grow into great trees, suggests a progress towards a perfect form. In his Poetics he applied this concept to the development of tragedy, and so identifies both a history of the beginnings of tragedy in some distant and more undeveloped past, as well as a present perfection of the form: Tragedy then gradually advanced, as men developed each element that came to light and after going through many changes, it stopped when it had found its natural form (trans
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Halliwell, 1995, 1449a79). For Aristotle, that most perfect form was exemplified in the tragedy Oedipus Tyrannus. Three hundred years later, Vitruvius presents the Classical orders of the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian as the exemplars of style, embodying the forms of male and female types, a set of models that provide a Classical canon (i.2.5; iv.1.57). Vitruvius sees the orders developing over time, evolving one from another from a more Primitive state towards a more perfect form, having made progress in refinement and delicacy of feeling, and finding pleasure in more slender proportions (trans Morgan, 1960, iv.1.9). From this confident perspective, locating himself and his Emperor to whom the book is dedicated in a Classical time, Vitruvius looks back to the origins of dwelling in the Primitive hut. In this way Vitruvius is able to construct his history, permitting his appreciation of the archaic state of the origins of dwelling and language. It is as if these two conditions, the Primitive and the Classical, form two sides of the same coin, where origins and ends become mutually interdependent.

It is as if these two conditions, the Primitive and the Classical, form two sides of the same coin, where origins and ends become mutually interdependent
Vitruvius account of the origins of building reconciles both of these themes in the perfection afforded by architecture. In parallel to his introduction to Book 2, Vitruvius introduces his account of what we now know as Vitruvian Man in Book 3. Leonardo da Vincis rendition of Vitruvian Man is one of the most enduring images of perfection. The language used to describe the figure comes from both a Pythagorean tradition of perfection represented in number, and an Aristotelean concern for wholeness. Vitruvius in 3.1.5 rallies Plato to his side in his advocacy of the teleion, a Greek term for the perfect number, which is the number ten from Pythagorean number theory. Perfection is the telos of the work of architecture, reflecting for Vitruvius the order he sees in the universe, and by analogy informs the design of a work of architecture, especially of a temple, which is the subject of Book 3. While we have seen in Book 2 that the origins of building arose in a primordial and agonistic state, in Book 3, through number and measure, proportion and symmetry, architecture reveals the order of the universe. The temple thus becomes the Primitive hut made perfect. This pattern is furthered in Book 4, which is concerned with the origins of the orders. He comments that his book is also conceived as a work of increasing perfection: following his brief account of the origins of matter in Book 2, Vitruvius launches into a description of the composition of bricks. He defends his arrangement of chapters, arguing that: For this book does not show of what architecture is composed, but treats of the origin of the building
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art, how it was reached, and how it made progress, step by step, until it reached its present perfection (trans Morgan, 1960, ii.1.89). Vitruvius sets up his theory as a series of substitutions, especially of the human body as a standing-in for architecture.9 Vitruvius understands architectural symbol as a signifier of meaning. He writes: Both in general and especially in architecture are these two things found; that which signifies and that which is signified. That which is signified is the thing proposed about which we speak; that which signifies is the demonstration unfolded in systems of precepts. (Vitruvius, trans Granger, 1983, i.1.3)10 To a modern eye, this generalization about meaning looks like near-contemporary semiotic theory, concerning signifier (quod significat) and that signified (quod significatur). He says that these are the two principal themes or inherent categories (propositio),11 of all things, especially of architecture. The root verb of these two themes is significo, to show by signs, point out, express, to signify, a term also common in rhetorical literature.12 Vitruvius here reduces architecture to eloquence, where meaning is something to be demonstrated as a mode of speaking. Similarly, his interpretation of the symbolic import of the columnar orders, the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, are expressed as matters of decorum. Their origins in Greek communities, and any other associations with religious or sacrificial rituals, have vanished from Vitruvius account of their origins (iv.1).13 By the early Empire, the use of Greek architectural orders loses their symbolic import in their translation to Rome. An order once specific to the sacrificial rituals of Greek cities, such as the Corinthian column and capital (Rykwert, 1982), adorns the fish markets and theatres of the Imperial city. Architecture is transformed as a symbolic enterprise, from the task of mimetic representation to that of the demonstration of status and propriety: architecture is reduced to eloquence, just as rhetoric is reduced from truth-saying to persuasion.

Architecture is transformed as a symbolic enterprise, from the task of mimetic representation to that of the demonstration of status and propriety: architecture is reduced to eloquence, just as rhetoric is reduced from truth-saying to persuasion
Vitruvius emphasis on an architects knowing things signified as well as the signifier is in part related to the emphasis given by rhetoricians on propriety. Quintilian gives us an indication of this when he writes: Clearness results above all from propriety in the use of words. But propriety is capable of more than one interpretation. In its primary sense it means calling things by their right names, and is consequently sometimes to be avoided, for our language must not be obscene, unseemly or

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mean (trans Butler, 1921, viii.2.1). In other words, signifying things correctly means knowing the order of things, the genus and the species, as is appropriate to decorum. The great sin of the orator, as for the architect, is to be guilty of improprium, impropriety (viii.2.34). In Vitruvius social context, architectural symbol itself becomes a problem of propriety.

abstraction and the reality of a thing. The elements earth, fire, water and air were seen as divinities inseparable from abstract principles (trans Tredennick, 1933, ii.1.56). The divine literally inhabited theses elements. Aristotle observes that philosophers in his own time no longer held this view, shifting their perception of the materiality of the world to an abstraction.

Symbolic exchanges Rhetoric and architecture share the same symbolic heritage. Both rely on figurative language, the analogous relations between things. Explaining proportion, Vitruvius refers to the Greek term analogia to describe its essential character (iii.1.1). In analogy, this stands for that, and so for proportion, the arrangement and measuring of parts stands for order. Proportion becomes a symbol, a metaphor of order. The use of metonymy, synecdoche and catachresis, major aspects of metaphor, are integral to the articulation of meaning in both oratory and architecture through associative practices. The place of metaphor, of substituting this for that, in the interpretation of architecture requires common recognition of its referents within a society, as well as an awareness of the value of the symbol within that language. Such an awareness in Greece and Rome comes to the fore with the rise of money in Greece in the fourth century BCE,14 and in Rome as late as the mid second century BCE.15 In societies unused to coins, the common understanding of something of value standing in for something else takes on a different symbolic understanding of the exchange involved. In the account given by Vitruvius on the origins of architecture in the Primitive hut, the story is really about the loss of the Primitive in the civilized city. Architecture is transformed in the process from the embodiment of symbol to that of a species of eloquence. This transformation is only possible in a culture where symbolic thinking itself has changed. The common origins of theory and of philosophy with that of money informs our thinking about the symbolic value of architectural language (Thomson, 1955).16 Both philosophy and the use of coins involve abstract reasoning and the abstract use of symbols, and emerge at the same time in the same social context. The relation between ideas and their social setting gives credence to the argument that philosophy is impossible without the institution of money. Alfred Sohn-Rethel has observed that the abstraction of the material world associated with exchange-based societies is witnessed in the separation of exchange from things, which leads to an abstract nature that is familiar and understandable only to people who are engaged in the acquisition and use of coins. An exchange-based or synthetic society is what Friedrich Engels called civilization, identified firstly with ancient Greek city states (Sohn-Rethel, 1978). Aristotle reflected on this transformation in Greek thought in a sketch in his Metaphysics, where he tells the story of philosophy in Greece before his own time. Once, he writes, philosophers made no distinction between the

The facade of a work of architecture demands eloquence in order to make an impression

The substitution of coins for the value embedded in things reinforces the universality of money. The use value of money is diminished from its role as a token, to that of vehicle of an impression, first of a stamp onto metal, and then as the stain of ink on thin paper. Its value lies in its cultural situation as a mediator of exchange, rather than in itself as an object, a value given to it by its abstracted use in the minds of human beings. In such cultures where values concerning things are embedded in abstract entities, an object such as a building inevitably comes to be similarly seen as a vehicle for signs, a field to receive impressions that embody meaning. Meaning in architecture has the character of an abstraction, a universalized object, relating in time and space to the history of similar objects. The facade of a work of architecture demands eloquence in order to make an impression. Architecture, as in Vitruvius account, becomes ordered in terms of categories or types, and in regard to social hierarchies, to status and decorum. Meaning is read much like hieroglyphics, a visual code whose impression masks something hidden, something waiting to be revealed. In this enterprise, metaphor is the primary agent of exchange in the formation of language, including architectural language. In societies used to the symbolic agency of money, architecture becomes an agent for meaning interpreted as an exchange. Cultures without money, without the symbolization attached to coins, are therefore sometimes labelled Primitive because of this lack. In such cultures, what constitutes origins can never be called Primitive, because the temporal equivalence evaporates. Origins can only ever be ab illo tempore, temporally ambiguous and almost touchable just outside of time, a paradigmatic time that forms the basis of subsequent particular interpretations. Vitruvius narrative is on the other hand a historicized narrative in pragmatic time,17 absent from any sense that the eternal is about to break through into the present. The Primitive, with its hidden capacity for violence and disorder, is thoroughly domesticated, a suitable origin for Classic exemplars. The glance backwards springs from a desire for the Classical, temporally being located elsewhere, lost in the Primitive or in the origins of things as in another time. This desire questions the efficacy of the present, and the ambiguity of the structures and words that
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articulate meaning in the present. For origins to be present now, the medium of the necessary alchemy is representation. The rhetoric of the Classical is about the measuring out of order, and the Primitive becomes a source for the story of that order. The relation of the Classical to narrative is foundational, but also appears as a genre of the Classical, especially in the representation of the archaic as a style.

The rhetoric of the Classical is about the measuring out of order, and the Primitive becomes a source for the story of that order
The Classicals relation to the Primitive is also underscored during Vitruvius time by an archaizing tendency in rhetoric reflecting conservative aristocratic values within Rome and its empire. To be austere in oratory was considered a virtue, a return to a Primitiveness in style most associated with Brutus and his circle, or in a former generation with the rude manner of Cato the Elder. Brutus circle were known as Atticists, and wrote and campaigned in opposition to what they considered to be decadent and indecorous speech, whose speakers showed Asiatic leanings. Cicero was a target of their venom, accused of being too soft to be manly (Quintilian, trans Butler, 1921, xii.10.1),18 and he wrote the Brutus and the Orator to defend his reputation. Atticists present themselves as being authentically Roman, and so Classical in their positioning, bringing a moral edge to their virtues against which others are judged and found wanting (Gombrich, 1966).19 Quintilian sets the Asiatic against a decorous Classical oratory, describing excesses in terms of foppish dress. The orator with a healthy body, who attempts to enhance [his] physical graces by the

effeminate use of depilatories and cosmetics, succeeds in merely defacing them by the very care which he bestows on them (trans Butler, 1921, viii.19).20 The Primitive is necessarily judged against the Classical, whose sources in the Primitive are assessed in both a chronological sense of progress, as well as in terms of the virtues of truth to origins, to originality, speaking of first things. It is rude, but becomes the foundation and measure of the Classical, and so the Classical and the Primitive are always in a conversation, a dialectic. The interpretation of origins may be rendered as essential or fundamental, and shares the Greek understanding of arche. While the Classical emerges out of the Primitive, the Classical is seen here as a body, as it is for Vitruvius, a decorous and complete human being. Its Classicism is a mask, as in the persona from a Roman play, for the agonistic forces of the Primitive beneath it. The personae were theatrical masks used by Roman citizens, a sign of their place in a social order. Cicero, in the first book of his De officiis (On Duties), borrows from the theatre to introduce a speculation on masking. He asserts that nature has given to us all a capacity to be actors. For the sake of decorum and propriety, our passions live behind a mask of reason and rectitude, our lives being lived according to that which is pre-destined for us. The word Cicero uses for this mask is persona, implicitly suggesting that our personhood is firstly revealed as a rhetorical layer. Rhetorical thinking, with its richly layered narratives, structures how people understand themselves and their role in a community. The effects of a culture such as that found in Rome in the time of Vitruvius, steeped as it was in rhetorical forms, can be seen in the way that the rhetorical use of the Primitive could be convincingly masked on the body of architecture.

Notes 1. Lovejoy and Boas (1935, p374) relate Vitruvius passage to Lucretius theory of the rise of Primitive human beings. See especially Lucretius, De rerum natura, v, 9251010. However, the more immediate source appears to be Cicero, who was indebted to Lucretius stages of human progress (Lovejoy and Boas, 1935, p243). In addition to De Oratore, i, 8, 3034, see also Cicero, Pro Sestio, xlii, 9192. 2. Cicero, De Oratore i.13.59: [] sed oratorem plenum atque perfectum esse eum dicam, qui de omnibus rebus possit varie copioseque dicere. 3. Cicero, De Oratore I.12.54: Hoc enim est proprium oratoris, quod saepe iam dixi, oratio gravis, et ornate, er hominum sensibus ac mentibus accommodata. 4. Cicero, De Oratore i.8.60; Vitruvius, De Architectura, 1.1.12. 5. Cicero, De Oratore i.25.113; Vitruvius, De Architectura, 1.1.3. 6. Cicero, De Oratore i.13.6163; i.16.69; Vitruvius, De Architectura, 1.1.4.

7. Cicero, De Oratore i.31.137: [] quod est homine ingenuo liberaliterque educato dignum. 8. Cicero, De Oratore i.16.72: [] neminem esse in oratorum numero habendum, qui non sit omnibus eis artibus, quae sunt libero dignae, perpolitus; [] 9. See especially the argument developed by Indra Kagis McEwen (2003) after Vitruvius own description of his task as writing the body of architecture. 10. Vitruvius, De Architectura, 1.1.3: Cum in omnibus enim rebus, tum maxime etiam in architectura haec duo insunt, quod significatur et quod significat. Significatur proposita res, de qua dicitur; hanc autem significat demonstatio rationibus doctrinarum explicata. 11. Categories (propositio), as translated by Rowland (1999), might be better translated as principal subject or theme, but in other contexts can also mean a setting forth or proposing, a

representation, or generally a proposition of any kind (Lewis and Short, 1993, p1471). 12. For literary references see s.v. significo: (Lewis and Short, 1993, pp16967) 13. See also Burkert (1983). For a speculation on the sacrificial origins of iconography of the Greek temple, see Architecture and Sacrifice in Hersey (1988, Ch 2, pp1146). 14. On use of coins in the sixth and seventh centuries BCE in Lydia, see Herodotus, i. 94 and Thomson (1955, p194). 15. The common use of coins in Roman society is very late, see Morley (1996, pp7980). 16. For further on relation between philosophy and money, see Frith (2003, pp2938). 17. On the role of architectural artefact and the play of origins and of oriented time, see Peter Carl (1992 esp pp5354). 18. The works of Brutus and his

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followers have been lost. 19. Gombrich (1966, p83) argues that periods of art after the Classical have been labelled as a critical response in opposition to the Classical, and includes the Romanesque, Gothic, Mannerism, Baroque, and Rococo. All have been seen as somehow degenerate, a decline of Classical standards, or that lack of decorum or judgement that leads to an excess of ornament, as for the Asiatic style of oratory. 20. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, viii, pr 19: [] namque et colorata et abstricta et lacertis expressa sunt; at eadem si quis volsa atque fucata muliebriter comat, foedissima sint ipso formae labore. References Aristotle, trans Rackham, H. (1926). Nichomachean Ethics, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London and G. P. Putnams Sons, New York. Aristotle, trans Tredennick H. (1933). Metaphysics, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London and G. P. Putnams Sons, New York. Aristotle, trans Tredennick, H. (1960). Posterior Analytics, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London and Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Aristotle, trans Halliwell, S. (1995). Poetics, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, London. Burkert, W., trans Bing, P. (1983). Homo Necans, The Anthropology of

Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, University of California Press, Berkeley. Carl, P. (1992). Architecture and Time; A Prolegomena, in AA Files 22, Autumn, pp4865. Gombrich, E. H. (1966). Norm and Form, Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, Phaidon Press, London. Gombrich, E. H. (2002). The Preference for the Primitive, Episodes in the History of Western Taste and Art, Phaidon, London. Frith, S. (2003). Mistaking Your Thoughts for Ideas: Theory and Practice and the Currency of Architecture, in Architecture Theory Review, Vol 8, No 2, pp2938. Hersey, G. (1988). The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Lewis and Short (1993). Latin Dictionary, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Lovejoy, A. O. and Boas, G. (1935). Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore. McEwen, I. K. (2003). Vitruvius, Writing the Body of Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Morley, N. (1996). Metropolis and Hinterland, The City of Rome and the Italian Economy, 200 BCAD200, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Mortley, R. (1986). From Word to Silence: The rise and fall of the logos, vol 1, Peter Hanstein, Bonn. Quintilian, trans Butler, H. E. (1921). Institutio Oratoria, Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann,

London and G. P. Putnams Sons, New York. Rykwert, J. (1982). The Corinthian Order in The Necessity of Artifice, Rizzoli, New York, pp3343. Sohn-Rethel, A. (1978). Intellectual and Manual Labour, A Critique of Epistemology, London, Macmillan Press. Thomson, G. (1955). Studies in Ancient Greek Society, Vol II, The First Philosophers, Lawrence and Wishart, London. Vitruvius, trans Morgan, M. H. (1960). The Ten Books on Architecture, Dover, New York. Vitruvius, trans Granger, F. (1983). De Architectura (Vitruvius on Architecture), 2 Vols, Loeb Classical Library, 2nd ed, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass and William Heinemann, London. Vitruvius, trans Rowland, I. D. (1999). The Ten Books on Architecture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York. Biography Stephen Frith graduated with a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1992, and is Professor of Architecture and Head of the Department of Architecture, University of Canberra. Authors address Professor Stephen Frith Professor of Architecture University of CanberraACT 2601 Australia Stephen.Frith@canberra.edu.au

A primitive exchange

Stephen Frith